


inherit the earth

by alongthewatchtower



Series: am woman, hear me roar [1]
Category: Jurassic World (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Animal Behaviour, Female Owen Grady, Here Be Dinosaurs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-20
Updated: 2015-07-20
Packaged: 2018-04-10 06:29:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4380803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alongthewatchtower/pseuds/alongthewatchtower
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Half her superiors used to think she didn’t have a brain at all in that pretty head, but the men she served with called her Batshit Grady, and she always, <i>always</i> worked until she had the respect of her animals, and never took it for granted. She’s a sun-and-salt blonde, with her big blue eyes; she can play dumb with the rest of them, play harmless, and there’s no really room for it here, when one wrong step could see you lose an arm, a head, your life. But she was always good at it, always knew how to smile.</p>
            </blockquote>





	inherit the earth

**Author's Note:**

> female!owen needed to happen, and thus the headcanon-y drabble was born. I blame paz for encouraging me, and angie for making me think I needed to watch this damn movie in the first place. THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT.

 

 

Owen’s history is written on her skin, in the way she stands, tall and unyielding, feet planted firmly or tap-tap-tapping to communicate with her girls.

Owen’s done her time with dogs finding bombs in far-flung deserts, and the Navy sent her to school so she had a shiny piece of paper when she swam with the dolphins and trained sea lions to find mines. Lessons learned litter her body, sun-and-salt bleached hair cut short because honestly, _fuck_  dealing with it long, a patchwork of stitched-together scars down one arm from an IED, toothmarks on her fingers from when the girls were fresh from the egg, and razor-thin slices on the dip of her cleavage from the three weeks Blue spent in a modified baby-sling against Owen’s chest.

_“Shhhh,”_ she says, scooping up baby Blue, all of three days old and now all alone, all her hatchmates too weak to survive. Owen cradles the tiny raptor in her hands, ignores the way Blue starts gumming at the gun callus on her thumb ( _fuck_ , _that’s teeth, ow)_ and firmly tells the lab techs that Blue is coming with her. There’s nothing left for them in this room, where Owen slept in a cot, waking every two hours to feed the babies under heat lamps pureed beef. This room smells like death and the beginnings of rot under antiseptic, and it's bound to be even worse with sharp raptor senses. Owen holds Blue to her chest with one hand while she signs a metric fuckton of paperwork - waivers and reports and yes-I-take-responsibility-for-this-baby-predator. Blue curls her tiny front arm around the opening of Owen’s shirt over her tits, and clings like a frightened kitten. The inside edge of her sickle-claw slices skin as she moves, and Owen grimaces, but ignores it. Blue noses at the blood, ducking her head unseen into Owen’s shirt, and someone sniggers and makes a breastfeeding joke as Blue chitters in concern.  _“S’ok, baby Blue,”_ Owen murmurs.  _“We’ll be away from these idiots in just a minute."_

She lives in Central America now, on an island of _dinosaurs_ , of all things, but the heat and the mosquitoes don’t bother her. She’s spent the last ten years of her life either covered in dirt and sand or smelling like fish, and she’s never been afraid of a little honest sweat. Claire Dearing wrinkles her nose, but smell is a Velociraptor’s most powerful sense, and always Owen smells the same, reassuring and consistent, clean skin and lemongrass soap and sweat, like _female_  and _blood_  and _Alpha._ There's a few days a month where Owen smells more like  _female_ and _blood_ than the others, but it never seems to set the girls on edge, like they know the difference between _wound_ or _prey_ and nope-not-pregnant. Mostly, Owen smells like a dinosaur keeper, and Claire might wrinkle her nose, but Owen couldn’t put up with a fancy perfume if she tried. Her boots are old and broken-in, sturdy, and she wears hard-wearing denim and lightweight shirts with the sleeves rolled up, a leather vest that’s seen her through the last ten years, soft and comfortable and with enough pockets ( _whistle and clicker and strapping tape and antiseptic and a thousand other things you never know you need until something goes wrong)_.

Blue’s got thousands of years of instinct that say the fleshy meatbag called Owen is _prey_ , and Owen never forgets it. Blue may have imprinted on her right out of the egg, but she’s not tame, and is never, ever safe. Owen never forgets, even when Blue is curled up warm against the thumpity-thump of Owen’s heart in her little sling, peering out at the baby trikes and chittering in curiosity at the big herbivores, staring disconcertingly at the keepers in the break room (the kind of stare that makes the long-extinct lizard hindbrain go cold in fear). Blue views her as some kinda mix of _alpha_  and _mama_ , and by the time the next raptor generation have hatched, it’s been two months, and Blue (too big for the sling now, fast like a greyhound and nearly as big) follows her around the backroads of the park. She’s muzzled outside the restricted area where Owen lives (temporary fencing keeping a perimeter around the trailer all the way down to the lake on one side, and Blue can climb it if she tries but knows she’s not allowed to), a soft leather contraption that’s more reminder ( _no-bite-no-bite)_  than anything else, enough give that Blue can chitter and snap without the locals getting nervous (keepers and staff alike _stupid_  in their belief that because Blue paces Owen with a muzzle on she’s _safe_ , and Owen spends her days barking at idiots _not to touch_ ). There’s potential for violence inside everyone, human or animal, and Owen spent too many years at war to ever forget. 

When the next gen hatches (three out of six make it out of the egg, and they all last through a week, so better than last time), Blue moves into the nursery section of the special raptor pen with the little ones. She’s a big sister now, beta to Owen’s alpha, has spent the last week in the hatchery with Owen, herding the egg-fresh babies with her nose and snapping when they began to fight, establishing her dominance and nipping them when they step out of line. Blue’s first weeks are formative to the way the others respond to Owen - Blue follows, Blue listens, Blue respects, so the others do. Owen hears the tap-tap-tapping of Blue’s sickle-claw, knows the difference between _be-afraid_  and _content-happy-content_. Five is a good, solid pack number.

Owen’s a social creature by nature, spends her days working with her little pack and Barry and the other keepers, who think she’s crazy and brilliant by turns but keep their distance. See, Owen is generally terrible at people. Men, she can do, as in, _men_  (brothers-and-sisters-in-arms, people you serve alongside, weeks and months of hurry-up-and-wait followed by minutes-hours-days of adrenaline and tiny decisions fraught with tension and consequence). People, the civilian, walking-around-going-about-their-lives type of people, she’s absolutely shit at. She lives alone, and when her four walls start closing in on her, Owen heads down to the back bar at Margaritaville (employees only, thank fuck, because if she had to deal with drunk tourists instead of drunk keepers, she’d stay in her trailer with her vibrator) wearing what for her is a goddamn _invitation to riot_ , tiny white tank and painted-on jeans. She drinks beer (slowly, because she’s still got to drive home, no after-hours public transport in the jungle) and swaps near-misses with Rexie’s keepers, laughs at the stories of Maria-the-voice-of-the-Mosasaurus, commiserates over the stupidity of tourists with Ethan Reynolds of Asset Containment, needles Barry about when he’s going to get up the courage to ask gift-store-Chris out. Her human pack isn’t as easy as her girls - people require effort, _hi-let’s-be-friends-let’s-get-dinner-how-was-your-day_ , but it’s worth it because for all the tilt of Blue’s head means quiet amusement, Owen’s girls can’t shoot the shit over a beer at the end of the day, can't sling an arm around her shoulders and press close in warmth and casual friendship.

Other nights, she meets up with Reynolds at his apartment in staff housing. Reynolds, who knew her by reputation when he was with the SEALs, who never asks about her scars or expects her to stay instead of going home after, throwing a leg over her bike when she's sated and slinky and fucked-out. The girls smell it on her the next day, they always do, no matter how much she washes, because their noses are just _that good_ , and if it takes another round of _I-am-the-goddamn-alpha_  than it did yesterday before they get into formation, none of the other keepers hear the undercurrent of _alpha-can-fuck-whoever-she-wants,_ that the scent on her skin is  _no-threat-no-threat-no-threat._ (They’re particularly interested when Reynolds comes around on patrol, but it’s curiosity tempered with _protect-alpha-protect-protect-protect_ , and Reynolds listens enough when Owen talks that he knows the hiss-and-snap is communication and posturing, not a particular promise of violence.)

When her younger girls are old enough, they go on “hunts” - Owen and Barry take a trip into the restricted zone and leave a cow (fresh kill, Owen does it herself, no stranger to butchering for food, and it’s important that the kill smell like her). Owen carries the scent back, sets the girls in their pens and revs her bike. The girls pick up the scent with no trouble at all, and they find the kill Owen has left them. They don’t get live food unless Owen allows it, because it’s important they know their food comes from her ( _the alpha provides)_.

There are two ways for a woman to deal with her gender in the armed services. Pretend she doesn’t have one, or acknowledge you do and dare everyone to make a big deal of it. The men she’s served alongside would joke sometimes about how they’d _forgotten Grady is a woman_. Owen never forgets, because she can’t. For a long time, Owen was a girl with a gun and a dog _(Cultural Support Team, K9 Unit Liaison, Another Redundant Name For Doing Work She’s Not Supposed To Be Doing)_ in places that didn’t look to kindly on women-with-guns, women-with-dogs, women _at all_ , until the animals rotated out and so did she, until she went to school and the Navy let her play with dolphins and teach sea lions how to find mines. Technically, the Navy never sent her into combat, but she’s got a bullet scrape or two and gun-calluses aplenty.

Half her superiors used to think she didn’t have a brain at all in that pretty head, but the men she served with called her Batshit Grady, and she always, _always_  worked until she had the respect of her animals, and never took it for granted. She’s a sun-and-salt blonde, with her big blue eyes; she can play dumb with the rest of them, play harmless, and there’s no really room for it here, where one wrong step could see you lose an arm, a head, your life. But she was always good at it, always knew how to smile. 

She had a CO once - real hardass, you know the type, good at commanding men, average at inspiring loyalty in them, passable at commanding animals but shit at respecting them. He used to tell her that she was coddling their dogs because she’s a fan of positive reinforcement. (The stick and the stick alone never got nobody’s loyalty.) Owen would nod, look a little bashful, and he’d shake his head at her “yessir” and move on. Hoskins is a similar breed of idiot. Her raptors are boys to Vic Hoskins when he wants them to be weapons, girls when he thinks she’s coddling them, and when Delta hisses and Echo stalks her way up to the bars, Owen swears they just _know_  he’s misgendering them, feet silent and eyes bright as they stare at the newcomer  _(threat-threat-threat)_. That’s partly her fault, the exhalation of her breath whistling out through her teeth in irritation, the way her smile and her tone say two different things. But Owen bets that to her girls, Hoskins smells like _aggression-deception-threat_ , and her raptors are smart enough to be able to tell that any respect Hoskins is pretending to show is just lip-service (which they don’t understand, anyway).

_Threat-threat-threat_ , and Charlie smashes the flat of her side against the cage, making Hoskins jump (don’t ever turn your back to the cage) and then laugh off his startled moment (and it’s as fake as his smile). Owen sees the problem that is Hoskins-the-idiot-who-thinks-militarising-raptors-is-a-good-idea coming, plants her feet and cocks her hips in challenge, leading with her pelvis like she's asking him to compare dick sizes, and Hoskins is an idiot but apparently picks up on enough of her body language that when she says no, she hasn’t had time for her reports this week, ( _you know what it’s like, oh, no, you probably don’t - you work in an office on the mainland, don’t you?_ ) he positively _growls_  at her, trying to establish dominance (idiot - see also: her _velociraptors_ ). And there’s almost nothing she won’t do for her animals, because she raised them, she protects them, and in return they don’t eat her.

Next visit, she needles the idiot ( _no, we don’t do punishment, that kind of thinking’s just idiotic_ ), and gets his hackles up ( _I’m a pacifist at heart, really_ ), in the subtle way anyone who’s ever served calls “white mutiny,” _(are you alright? the animals can smell sickness, you know)_ and pushes _(they can also smell weakness, you know)_ , tiny little things all through the next month to irritate the man until he snaps and lays her out, just socks her one in front of a dozen cameras and even more witnesses. (The Navy never sent her into combat, but they sent her animals, and so Owen went too - she’s trained with SEALs for fuck’s sake.)

Owen knows how to fight, but more importantly she knows how to fall, how to make herself seem smaller when she sprawls in the dirt, the raptors hissing on the other side of the cage, throwing themselves against it, going absolutely wild, and everyone else present knows that if the bars weren’t there, Hoskins would be a smear on the ground ( _once-there-was-a-man-by-the-name-of)_. Owen knows that sometimes when you don’t hold the power, you have to make your own, and she isn’t above using all the misconceptions and sterotypes about helpless women if it helps her babies. The ACU boys snap to, getting between her and Hoskins, who’s leaning over and shouting _(idiot bitch, these are killers, and you’re coddling them, trying to hug them)_ , and when he turns to yell at them _(get your hands off me)_  Owen stretches out and hooks her ankle, faux-casual, and Hoskins trips and lands on his idiot face in the gravel, and the ACU has to pick him up and dust him off before escorting him back to base in their troop van.

She goes into the way-cage so there’s only one set of bars between Owen and her girls, reaches out to rub their snouts as they hiss in outrage and scent her obviously, clamouring to check on her, _alpha-alpha-alpha_ , and there’s no way Hoskins can come anywhere near them now, his dream of tame-yet-deadly raptors impossible when they’ll kill him if they get close.  _“Shhh, shhh. We’re okay. We won. He’s gone. No-threat. No-threat.”_ There’s no guarantee his replacement won’t be just as bad, might not even be so easily manipulated, but InGen have another thing coming if they think they own her raptors. Her girls belong to themselves, to each other, and, nominally, to her, in the way that she belongs to them, and Owen will do anything to keep them safe.

Reynolds tries not to smirk too noticeably when he comes out to the pen a half hour later to tell her in person that Hoskins is being escorted off the island pending review, and Owen spits blood and smiles (slow like syrupy sunshine, and check your wallets and your fillings, boys, you just got played). Masrani’s not an idiot, for all he’s an idealist, and he’s seen the blacked-out gaps in her service record, but he _listens_ when Owen points out later that if the man treats people like that, if he’s quick to anger and even faster to violence, he has no business being around animals.

Her jaw bruises up bold, just another mark, and even though it’ll be gone in a week, the throb of her cheekbone feels like victory, and if Owen had a sickle-claw of her own, it’d be tap-tap-tapping in triumph.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! let me know what you think below. there is so much yet unexplored, so who knows, there may be other f!Owen works someday!


End file.
